Exclamative que/că constructions in Ibero-Romance and Romanian

Abstract

The paper discusses Romanian că exclamative structures in comparison with their Ibero-Romance counterparts. It demonstrates that Romanian uses că as an illocutionary complementiser, homophonous to its subordinating counterpart, to mark an exclamative illocutionary force, much as Ibero-Romance languages do with que. Exclamative că/que utterances are expressive speech acts. They convey non-propositional meaning that extends beyond the at-issue content of the utterance. Specifically, they indicate the speaker’s attitudinal or emotional stance towards the propositional content, which is presupposed to be true. Such utterances encode a range of “non-neutral” mental attitudes, including surprise, admiration, or criticism. Moreover, they share with other exclamative structures core properties such as presuppositionality and a scalar interpretation. Unlike in Ibero-Romance, Romanian că exclamatives are restricted in the range of syntactic configurations they employ, always featuring dislocation to the left periphery.